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A History of Vagrancy and Homelessness in Global Perspective

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A History of Vagrancy and Homelessness in Global Perspective Beier.1-34 10/3/08 10:14 AM Page 1 Introduction Vagrancy and Homelessness in Global and Historical Perspective Paul Ocobock , , , beggars, bums, mendicants, idlers, indigents, itinerants, the underclass, and the homeless—all these names and legal categories seek to describe poor, unemployed, and highly mobile people—people who form the focal point of this collection of essays. Vagrancy laws are unique; while most crimes are defined by actions, vagrancy laws make no specific action or inaction illegal. Rather the laws are based on personal condition, state of being, and social and economic status.1 Individuals merely need to exhibit the characteristics or stereotypes of vagrants for authorities to make an arrest.2 Thus, vagrancy can mean and be many different things to many people, and therein lies its legal importance as a broad, overarching mechanism to control and punish a selective group of people. Yet what are these qualities that arouse the suspicion of police and transform people into vagrants? Through history, those so labeled and arrested for vagrancy have often been poor, young, able-bodied, unemployed, rootless, and homeless.3 Yet it has been the seeming vol- untary unemployment and mobility of people for which vagrancy laws have been designed.4 In general, the primary aim of vagrancy laws has been to establish control over idle individuals who could labor but Beier.1-34 10/3/08 10:14 AM Page 2 choose not to and rootless, roofless persons seemingly unfettered by traditional domestic life and free to travel outside the surveillance of the state. Over time, particularly in the twentieth century, vagrancy became a catchall category favored for a “procedural laxity” that al- lowed the state to convict a “motley assortment of human troubles” and circumvent “the rigidity imposed by real or imagined defects in criminal law and procedure.”5 As the geography and heterogeneity of punishable social ills increased, more and more fell under the classifi- cation of vagrancy. As a result, explaining what vagrancy means, who vagrants are, and why they attract the ire of the state, is fraught with difficulty. As this collection of essays attests, vagrants can be peasant farmers, lit- erate ex-soldiers, famine victims, former slaves, beggars, political agitators, newsboys, migrant laborers, street people, squatters, and in some cases, those the state and the upper classes feared had breached social norms. Yet, the complicated nature of vagrancy and its connec- tions to human labor, mobility, behavior, and status have made it a useful historical tool to scholars. Historians have used the concept of vagrancy to examine a vast array of processes, including the develop- ment and impact of the market economy, migration of labor, con- struction of modern states and imperial structures, formation of subcultures among the poor, rapidity of urbanization, and responses to poverty through charity, welfare, or prosecution. Since the s, when the first historical work was conducted on vagrancy, the topic has remained divided by region and time period. Most histories of vagrancy have focused on European and American experiences from the medieval period to the twentieth century; after all vagrancy is a European invention. Even recent scholarship on vagrancy in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East has focused on periods in which European notions of poverty and vagrancy law have been adopted through the imposition or influence of European law. In many ways, this collection of essays cannot escape the European experience. However, over half the chapters focus on regions outside Europe, and in each instance the authors seek to explore the ways in which va- grancy diverged from its European counterpart once introduced to the wider world. Furthermore, the collection attempts to bridge some of | Paul Ocobock Beier.1-34 10/3/08 10:14 AM Page 3 the geographic, temporal, and disciplinary divides that have discour- aged a global history of vagrancy and homelessness. The purpose of juxtaposing these works is not to expose a uniformity of vagrancy’s form and function among nations and across centuries, but rather to explore the development of vagrancy (or lack thereof) as a common response to managing poverty, labor, and social norms, and how this strategy changed over time and adapted to regional peculiarities. The contributions in this collection straddle seven centuries, five continents, and several academic disciplines. They delve deeper into the struggle of societies to understand and alleviate chronic poverty, whether through private charity, criminalization, institutionalization, or compulsory labor. Some chapters illustrate the power of vagrancy laws as coercive engines in punishment and exploitation; others highlight the utter failure of vagrancy policies at the hands of human agency, state incapacity, and persistent personal charity. Several of the chapters envision vagrancy as a lifestyle, by choice and circumstance, in which people define themselves by both opposing and appropriat- ing cultural norms. The authors offer fresh perspectives on old histo- riographical debates or new research in fields that have yet to fully investigate vagrancy and homelessness. Poverty and Charity in a World without Vagrancy Most histories of vagrancy set the stage in fourteenth-century England, as the Black Death ravaged the population, both rich and poor. Schol- ars have found this to be the most appropriate place to mark the origins of the term vagrancy and the laws that followed. However, poverty was not born amid the horror of the plague, and earlier societies had their own arrangements to cope with it. In some cases, the paths into poverty and responses to it did not take on the same form as they did in fourteenth-century England; in others they formed the precur- sors to Europe’s religious charity and the struggle to determine those worthy of it. The Greeks of the classical period made a distinction between a poor person (penes) and a beggar (ptochos, “one who crouches and Introduction | Beier.1-34 10/3/08 10:14 AM Page 4 cowers”). The poor were generally considered small landowners with just enough means to survive but who could not partake in the leisure of the city-state. In Rome, beggars, or the landless and wage earning, were described by Cicero as “‘dordem urbis et faecem,’ the poverty stricken scum of the city,”who should be “drained off to the colonies.”6 Despite such colorful language, begging and destitution did not rep- resent a serious social problem in the minds of Greek and Roman city leaders; the unemployed were merely lazy. The charity of the wealthy was given out of civic pride to their beloved cities or out of pity to their wealthy neighbors who had fallen on hard times. Ac- cording to A. R. Hands, the truly poor had to seek salvation by their efforts, but options were few. They could obtain plots of land if they were willing to leave the city-states for the colonies or join the ranks of mercenary soldiers, as thousands did in the fourth century.7 In the late Roman Empire, the rise of the Christian church trans- formed these earlier notions of charity into concern for the well-being of the poor. Charity, or “love of the poor,”by Christians and Jews, was a new departure from the classic Greek and Roman periods. This change in outlook occurred not only because of rapid demographic growth and increasing migration of the poor to cities, but because the leaders and the rank and file of the church made room for the poor in their lives. In the late Roman Empire, the church redefined the poor to include the very beggars and destitute the classical Greeks and Romans had excluded. The pity that was reserved for unfortunate citi- zens in Greece was refocused on the hungry, huddled masses standing outside city gates. Moreover, the poor were not associated, as they would one day be in early modern Europe, with bandits, rogues, and barbarians of the hinterland. It was the duty of the church to spend its wealth, through its representative, the bishop, on alleviating the suffering of the poor.8 This compassion for the poor was bound to the belief that God was the supreme giver to those who believed, and likewise, that the rich man should emulate this relationship with his poorest neighbors. Over the course of the late Roman Empire, church leaders rose to prominence in their role of caretakers to the faithful as well as the poor, establishing a form of charity that would influence European society and politics for centuries to come.9 | Paul Ocobock Beier.1-34 10/3/08 10:14 AM Page 5 As in Christian and Jewish communities, religion played an inte- gral role in poverty alleviation in the Muslim world. In the Middle East, Islamic and pre-Islamic Arab culture wove together to form an enduring tradition of private charity. Before and during the medieval Islamic period, gift giving by the wealthy to the poor was the primary means of poor relief and redistribution of wealth, as it was in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa.10 Muslims had a religious and often legal duty to give alms to the poor. Muslim theologians stressed that poverty brought spirituality into closer focus. Dervishes among Sufi Muslims pushed this philosophy further by living in absolute poverty as a tes- tament to their religious fervor.11 Yet, not all poor were treated equally by the benevolence of the state and the wealthy. From the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries, immigration placed a strain on the elites of Middle Eastern towns, and foreign paupers were given the lowest pri- ority on the scale of public charity. To be entitled to relief, foreigners had to seek out locals to vouch for them.12 In both Mamluk Egypt and the early modern Ottoman Empire, private, personal charity ex- isted side by side with some public forms of poor relief.
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